


It All Starts With A Lullabye

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [33]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Breakfast, Domestic Fluff, Earth-3, Families of Choice, French Toast, Gen, Healing, Mirror Universe, Paranoia, Past Brainwashing, Past Child Abuse, Team as Family, Touch-Starved, and ex-Talons not knowing how to handle that, bossy six-year-old, but does the right thing anyway, good parenting, harlequin is slightly more realistic, jokester is basically a cotton candy machine in disguise, other Owlman-adjacent ugh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 08:10:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9375965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Jason woke up more times than he fell asleep, it felt like, that first night. Until just as dawn was crawling in like she lost a fight, he heard the pitter-patter of little feet somewhere upstairs. Getting closer.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CampionSayn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CampionSayn/gifts).



> Another entry on the curved line of how-Jason-joined-the-Circus! This one happened because of a suggestion from CampionSayn, so saluations!
> 
> (I love the internet. Specifically I love the way people pick names and images to represent them online, such that I tend to think of CS as if there is literally a sapient rabbit typing comments on my fics and there is nothing weird about that at all.)

He bedded down on the sofa around three AM and some of the lunatics went to their own dens, but some of them stayed up. He could hear them at the kitchen table, whispering. Too quiet to hear who it was.

He decided it was Crocodile and Ivy, on the basis that he would be stupid to try to fight them both alone without any special equipment, so the part of him that wanted to get cold feet and slink back to the Cave could just shut up. Like it wasn’t way too late for that, anyway. His right thigh gave a phantom ache where he’d carved the transponder out from just beside the bone, before they left that warehouse. The clown had wrapped the foul little machine in a polka-dot handkerchief and made Janus go throw it in the river to get washed out to sea.

Should’ve tied it to a seagull, _that’d_ have confused the trail.

Should’ve killed all those witnesses in the warehouse. Not—not the family, with the hostage, obviously, that would be…but the others, his men, the Owl’s men, bunch of sick fucks. He always wished the clown’s crew would fight to kill. Thin out the ranks a little.

Didn’t matter if Owlman knew sooner, though, he guessed. No head start to build, if you aren’t running anyplace.

He lay there, still and heavy on the sofa where they’d left him. Drifting off to the rise and fall of hushed voices, the occasional footstep upstairs or clank of plumbing. The sofa was against an internal wall, in a ground-floor room with heavy curtains, and if he lay with his head at the right end he could keep the windows in his peripheral vision and look through the only actual entrance, a doorframe with no door in it, and keep an eye on the front hall and the staircase that descended into it. The soft, loose clothes they’d put him in felt weird, and feeling sheet or sofa-upholstery slide against the skin of his feet or hands kept jolting him alert again.

How long had it been since he’d slept barefoot, since he’d had the gloves off long enough to do anything besides shower? He’d been Talon barely two years. It wasn’t like Owlman hadn’t given him a berth, with a blanket, even, in winter, but he hadn’t given him a lot of time to spend in it, and Talon was never really off-duty. And the street had already taught him not to sleep too deep _long_ before the Court ever took him.

Jason woke up more times than he went to sleep, it felt like, that first night. He was grateful for it, actually, the way he never drifted enough to forget where he was and who he was surrounded by. Never had to wake up and realize all over again what he’d chosen to do, and confront it brand-new and hard-surfaced all over again. Just to listen for anything suspicious, and go back to sleep.

The fact that he was surrounded by enemies wasn’t the problem. He was always surrounded by enemies. It wasn’t that it didn’t still get to him, but if he let it stop him from sleeping he’d be dead by now, or worse. (He carefully avoided thinking that he’d already been _worse_.) Eventually all the voices stopped. There was nothing to hear but normal city-noise.

Been a long time since he fell asleep listening to city noise. Maybe that was one of the reasons he kept waking up. Wasn’t quite sure what was normal and what wasn’t, yet.

Now the sound of little padding feet tug him from the deepest dream yet, and he wakes thinking it’s the Dominican kid he was supposed to kill. (Or some other kid, one he actually did kill. There were too many. Any is too many, and he thought he was long past throwing up over killing people but as he finishes surfacing to the present moment he feels his gut churning again. Forces it still.)

He lies there on the sofa, staring up. Dawn is crawling in like she lost a fight, and outside the world is softening to gray; enough thin light spills in around the edges of the curtains and through the frosted window in the front door that he can make out the pebbled texture of the ceiling.

Those really are a child’s footsteps. They were scampering, earlier, across a wood floor upstairs somewhere, but now they skulk. Kid doesn’t know how to cushion a step, it’s like listening to a forty-pound elephant.

A step creaks, and the little creeper goes still with a tiny gasp. Waits to see if anyone heard it.

Jason lies very still. After a few seconds, the kid sneaks, very badly, onward. Downward.

It comes into his line of sight quickly enough, easing itself one step at a time on its bottom. Which spreads out the weight to make creaking less likely, he guesses, but its butt makes a sliding sound at every step that is hella suspicious. Someone besides him in this cramped little hive of lollipops, rainbows, and sedition has to have some level of paranoia, right? Or they’d all be dead. Therefore someone will come to collect the brat _before_ it gets near the newly-defected-from-evil monstrosity they’re keeping in the front room.

His eyes are hooded almost shut, and he keeps his breathing steady. The kid is kneeling, halfway down the stairs, its face pressed into the banister to peer into the room. Its hands are so small they don’t wrap entirely around the spindles it’s clinging to, _fuck_. At least it definitely isn’t the one from last night, the color’s wrong. It’s also too big.

It must decide he doesn’t look dangerous, because eventually it comes the rest of the way down the stairs with that execrable stealth technique (Jason flinches a little in his head as he realizes where he picked up that expression, but fuck, he can use whatever words he wants to, and _execrable_ is the one that describes that sneaking) and pads into the living room. At this range the odds of it noticing the line of brightness where his eyes aren’t quite closed are too high, so he drops his lids.

The kid _keeps coming closer_ , and finally he’s lying there, faking sleep, with its breathing right over him.

He’s faked sleep in front of much scarier things, but his breath is still getting hard to keep even. What is it _doing_ here? Did they rescue it from somewhere? Is the Jokester just starting some kind of collection program? The idea strikes him uneasily, because he’s almost an adult but the clown clearly still thinks of him as a child, and even though there’s no way this could be as bad as what he’s left behind there is something hells of skeevy about anybody who just starts up _collecting_ kids….

It pokes him in the mouth, and he jumps, eyes now definitely open and fists tucked up against his chest, to keep them from going anywhere else. _Fucking hell._ Only his years of Talon training keep him from swearing a blue streak at some little kid, and only having known it was there all along kept him from lashing out when he was touched, but the kid’s just staring down at him, grinning.

“ _You toootally weren’t asleep,_ ” she whispers loudly, she because it’s a girl. She’s got sort of dirty-blonde hair tied into two skinny little braids just behind her ears, and the smug, victorious look on her face seems weirdly familiar—oh. Oh, holy fuckballs. No way. No.

She looks just like both her parents, a feat which should not be anywhere in the vicinity of possible. But the pointy little nose is Harlequin’s, with a softened little miniature of the Jokester’s bone structure at the very top; that’s Harlequin’s chin, and the Jokester’s grin if his mouth were a normal size, and the eyes aren’t quite like either of them though the eyebrows resemble both, and what the hell is this. How did nobody ever even suspect this.

They can’t let him leave alive, now that he knows, and he stops breathing.

The kid’s eyebrows draw together, and she pats him on the cheek. Her coordination is little-kid sloppy (what is she, five?) so it’s kind of more like smacking him, but he’s been slapped in the face by people strong enough to knock out teeth, the impact doesn’t register as ‘pain,’ though he can’t really call it gentle. “ _You okay?_ ” she asks, and then apparently decides he is because he’s breathing again. “ _What’s your name?_ ”

He licks his lips. The Jokester and company are crazy, but they wouldn’t have brought him here if finding out about the kid was a killing offense, right? Anyway if it is, he can still run. He will be absolutely 100% fucked in that scenario, but never mind. “Jason,” he says. “Jason Todd.”

She nods in approval. “Why’re you onna couch?”

“There weren’t enough beds,” Jason says.

The girl thinks about that. “Mella,” she says.

“Huh?”

“ _Ella,_ ” she repeats. “I’m _Ella._ ”

“Oh. So…what do you do for fun around here?” Small talk. With a five-year-old. Great. Still, lessons learned for getting along with other kids without a scrap are probably still kind of useful in this scenario, even if she’s already friendly.

He’s been treated to a lengthy explanation of card games, board games, reasonably entertaining children’s television programs, good places to practice handstands, the rules of hopscotch and which neighborhood kids cheat, and how Ella is not very good at clapping games even though her daddy is and it isn’t fair, by the time her voice has risen to a volume that leaves him unsurprised by the sound of adult footsteps in the upstairs hall.

The footfalls say Harlequin to him by the time they reach the stairs, because it’s too light to be anyone else but Nigma and the rhythm seems wrong for him. He’s right, and she rushes down the stairs in a barefoot pitter-patter that isn’t quite a run.

Harlequin looks horrified, when Jason twists his neck enough to get a look at her, and he goes back to staying extraordinarily still.

He’s not sure exactly what he’s afraid will happen if he pushes her into flipping out—rationally speaking, he guesses the worst-case scenarios are that either he fights his way out of here bloodily and goes running through the streets in pajamas until Owlman drags him back to the Cave for punishment, or he _doesn’t_ fight his way out and they, uh, beat him until his bones break and then bury him in concrete and _okay those are really horrifying worst case scenarios **this** is why you got out of the habit of thinking, Jason, this is why._

Though it isn’t actually the main reason, exactly. The things he _needed_ to not think about weren’t so much bad things that could happen to him—because they probably would—as bad things that were already real, bad things he was doing. As the way he knew he was going to keep doing them.

He’s actually not sure whether he’s more terrified of Harlequin’s reaction right now, or his own. _What if they attack him and he takes the kid hostage,_ what if it’s reflex by now, why the hell did they leave a child unsecured in the same building as him?

“Morning Mommy,” the kid greets, a little bit perfunctory as if her mother can’t expect to hold her attention when there’s a stranger to lecture about hopscotch.

The blonde woman pastes on a smile just in time. “Well, I see you two have met. I’m making French toast, who’s hungry?”

Ella gives an excited little wriggle and thrusts her hand up like she’s the prize pupil in a class of one, now thoroughly distracted from both Jason and games. “Me! Me! I want it with cin’mon sugar!”

“Coming right up,” Harlequin tells her daughter, and the smile seems pretty real but then she looks at Jason and it goes strained again. “How hungry are you?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” Jason says reflexively.

“Do you think you could eat two pieces of French toast?”

 _Lady, I could eat a dozen,_ but he doesn’t say that. Partly it’s habit—the Owl trained him out of asking for anything he didn’t _need_ and most things he did, and this feels like a trick question—but also he’s pretty sure he actually couldn’t. As long as he’s spent fantasizing about having all the food he can eat, it hasn’t been six hours since she stuffed him with pasta, and he could barely keep all of _that_ down.

It’s not a surprise they’re feeding him: he mostly believes that they actually are good people. He still doesn’t want to throw up their food all over their floor just because he had no self-control. “Yep,” he says airily.

“Coming right up,” she repeats. “C’mon, sugarplum fairy, help me crack the eggs?”

“Can Jason come?”

There’s barely a pause. “If he wants to, sure.”

Ella grabs for his hand, and he almost jerks back but at the last second he doesn’t, and then she’s pulling on it and he can’t move. The pressure against his palm, tiny fingertips, bare skin, it—he—

The other little hand smacks his knee. “ _Jason_ , wake up! French toast!”

He breathes again. Looks up at the impatient little imp and tries to be normal, because she hasn’t realized yet that he’s not. His hand is still tingling madly and there’s a thing like phantom pain that doesn’t actually hurt tugging up and down his arm, but he’s got his head together. “Yeah, yeah, short stuff. Hang on, it’s first thing in the morning, some of us woke up getting poked in the mouth here.” The complaint is maybe partly so Harlequin knows he didn’t lure her kid in even a little bit; this wasn’t his fault. He glances over at her as he stands up, and…doesn’t know what to think of her expression.

It looks like he’s surprised her, that’s for sure. If she’s surprised he didn’t rip out her kid’s throat with his teeth for hitting him, or something, he disapproves to the maximum that she didn’t separate them the _second_ she got here, whether it would upset the girl or not. He’s a _very dangerous bird_ , after all.

Maybe she wasn’t expecting him to talk, or at least to talk like a person instead of Talon. Except he already did that last night, she has to have heard him. Maybe he sounds less like he’s faking it now? He still kind of feels like it. Oh well. Whatever. Ella smacks him on the hip and pulls on his hand. “Breakfast!” she prompts. “And we’ll play after, okay?”

He slides out from under his blanket and lets the little girl tug him along. She lets go of him when they get to the kitchen and it’s time to have fun with eggs.

He wishes he had a bed to hide under when he realizes part of what he finds comforting about her is that she keeps hitting him. Nothing like a little normality to smooth out your adjustment period, he guesses. He does not try to hide under the table. He’s not crazy.

It occurs to him that they _are_ , though, and maybe Jokester offered to save him because he thought he was. But Harlequin isn’t acting especially crazy, and if he hides under the table Ella will probably just follow him there and ask why.

Harlequin points out a cupboard and a drawer and asks him to get out ‘some plates and forks.’ He debates for a while whether to ask how many; finally just counts up everyone who didn’t leave last night—Ivy, Janus, Enigma, Croc, Strawman, Jokester, Harlequin, do they actually all live together?—plus himself and Ella, and gets out a stack of nine, and nine forks.

They don’t match. He’s not sure why he notices that, it’s not like they even _had_ nine plates at home, let alone a matched set, but Wayne did. Jason remembers seeing them, one of the only times he was allowed in the house, rows and rows of dishes polished clean and perfectly identical. For one guy who lived alone. He remembers thinking it was kind of funny.

Meanwhile the ladies have progressed from cracking eggs into a bowl to sticking holes in the ends of the eggs with a pin and _blowing_ until the insides come out, leaving them with a mostly-intact eggshell. Why.

Apparently some family friend makes Christmas ornaments out of hollow eggshells, and they’re saving the eggs for them. Jason didn’t even have to ask, he just waited. Harlequin rinses the shells and puts them back in the carton. Ella is entrusted with use of a whisk; this is a bad decision. Harlequin appears to regret nothing. Seasonings are added according to no particular recipe, and then bread goes into the egg mixture.

“Do you drink coffee?” Harlequin asks him, pouring herself a cup from the pot she set brewing when they came in—someone left it cleaned out and full of fresh grounds and water last night so all she had to do was press a button, somehow that kind of preparedness surprises him even though he’s been running afoul of meticulously laid Circus traps for years. The Jokester only _acts_ like he’s incapable of forethought, and most of the others don’t even really go that far.

He shakes his head. Harlequin accepts this information without comment and flips the first piece of eggy bread into the hot frying pan. “Milk? I think we have orange juice.” She pulls open the fridge to check. “El-faunt, I know you want a juice. Grab one of your cups?” She’s taking another pair of mugs from the shelf as she asks, and then looks expectantly at Jason.

“Uh.” Both sound good. He misses fruit. He needs calcium, and milk goes better with French toast. “Milk, please.”

“Sure thing.” She pours him a mug, passes it over, flips the cooking toast, and sips her black coffee. The lack of transition between the movements is—strange. Because it’s familiar. Apparently Harlequin occupies a kitchen the same way she does a battlefield.

Ella produces a plastic sippy cup taken from a low cabinet, and Harlequin fills that with juice from a nearly-empty carton and sends her to sit at the table. Asks Jason for a plate. He gives her the top one off the stack; she slides the completed toast onto it, passes it back to him, and starts another.

Jason sets the breakfast down in front of Ella, who commences to slather it in margarine and shake insane amounts of cinnamon sugar on top of that, passes her a fork and knife, and then decides to claim a chair and sit down with his milk. Nobody appears to find this inappropriate or even noteworthy, so he sips from his mug and tries not to stare too obviously. Harlequin is keeping busy while the latest toast cooks filling the other mug with coffee, adding sugar and milk this time. The first mug isn’t even empty yet so Jason suspects it isn’t for her, but who knows. Clowns.

This doesn’t feel real. Or…it feels completely real, solid and human and it seems impossible that he’s actually in the room.

The Jokester is summoned down the stairs by the smell of cooking, to judge by the appreciative sniffing going on as he appears. He’s wearing mismatched striped pajamas and the tie must have come off the end of his braid overnight because it’s halfway through unravelling. He’s a rumpled, amiable mess, but Jason finds himself tensing up anyway; Jokester is his…sponsor here, and while that means he’s on his side it also means he needs him to _stay_ on his side, or he is utterly humped. Ella barely glances up at her father before going back to devastating her breakfast.

“Fooooood,” the clown intones, dragging out the chair to Jason’s left and dropping into it.

“Morning sugarplum,” says Harlequin, and then passes him the extra coffee and bends over him. There’s smooching, which is a stupid kid’s word but also the one that fits what this pair of dorks are actually doing. “Mwah. Wait your turn,” she adds, turning back to the stove. “Ella and Jason got up first.”

Jokester shrugs philosophically, and seems to notice Jason for the first time. “Mornin’,” he says, sipping at his coffee.

“…morning.” Can hardly disagree with _that_ can he. Sun’s most of the way up outside, he thinks.

He waits. Jokester sips his sweet white coffee. Looks from Jason to Ella and back again. “So I see you two’ve met.”

“She snuck down when it was barely dawn and started poking me.” That was a lot less smooth than last time, but at least it sounded like complaining instead of making sure it was on the record that he hadn’t initiated contact.

“Getting a head start on Christmas, huh princess?” the clown teases, and then his face goes all stern and disappointed. “El…”

She finally looks up, her hands busily sawing away another triangle of French toast. “He was in the house! People in the house are safe.” She stuffs the food in her mouth and adds around it, “I wanted to see.”

“Yeah, okay, but you should still have checked it was okay instead of sneaking.”

“You might’ve said no.”

Jokester bursts out laughing. And it is pretty funny that she thinks this is a reasonable argument, but _seriously._

“J, don’t encourage her,” scolds Harlequin. She holds out a hand to Jason. “Plate.”

He hands her one, and she flips the second slice of toast onto it. “I don’t know what you like on yours,” she observes, handing him the plate back and stepping up beside the stove again to get the piece of bread that will presumably be Jokester’s out of the egg and into the pan. “J, get the honey and jam out, would you?”

“Sure thing, muffin.”

“The cinnamon’s fine,” Jason says. No one disagrees with him, but Jokester heaves himself out of his chair and starts assembling condiments anyway. Judging by the volume of the eggs, they are planning on feeding at least nine people. Do they really only have one frying pan?

Jason eats his french toast with butter and cinnamon sugar, though not as much of either as Ella. Jokester covers his, when it arrives, in strawberry jam and honey, while Harlequin starts another piece that Jason assumes is for herself.

“Where’s everybody else?”

Harlequin snickers. “Sleeping in.”

“Their loss,” Jokester proclaims, and tucks in.

‘Everyone else’ does make eventual appearance, turning the kitchen slowly more crowded and noisy and taking turns superintending the frying pan, and while Jason passes the second half of his second piece of toast to Ella and cedes his place at the table to Strawman, he hesitates to leave the room. (Because he fears what they might decide behind his back, or he doesn’t dare dismiss himself without permission?) Sits down on top of the iron radiator tucked into one corner, a choice that becomes a little more uncomfortable when Ella comes over and tries to basically climb up his leg.

He realizes after a second that she wants to sit in his lap, which is kind of terrifying both because his brain tried to shut down when she _grabbed his hand_ and because her entire family saw him come within inches of murdering a girl a couple years younger than her last night and they all know it wasn’t the first time, and overstepping his boundaries with the tyke they clearly all adore seems like the easiest way to get the Gotham Circus to cut him up into very tiny pieces and scatter them across the landscape.

Jason folds his legs up and watches the rest of breakfast over the tops of his knees. Ella plainly considers being offended, but instead stands next to him hanging onto his ankle and smacking the top of his foot occasionally for emphasis, until her interest in him finally wanes and she scurries over to clamber up and sit on the Crocodile.

Before he can decide whether it would be a good idea to go over and start washing plates, Dent is laughingly reminded it’s his turn to do so (because somebody swapped with someone else in a pattern that sounds suspiciously like they don’t actually keep track of whose turn things actually are) and sets to with a brush. Breakfast dishes are pretty straightforward, and he has all the plates briskly scoured before the rest of his posse are done sitting about drinking coffee and planning their day.

Jason slips over and starts drying. He knows where the plates go because he’s the one that took them out.

Dent shoots him a startled sidelong look, but doesn’t protest. Nobody comments at all, actually, and Jason is left to peacefully edge his way between bodies in a bubble of silence to slide glasses back into cupboards, until breakfast has officially broken up and it’s just him and the freshly-scrubbed frying pan. He has to poke around a little before he figures out where that goes. They do have more than one. Maybe they didn’t want to have to wash them.

Jokester catches him on his way out of the empty kitchen, doesn’t grab him but herds him to one side of the door by gesture and crowding. Jason lets himself be herded. He’s been waiting for this since he made his decision, really.

“Is El being a problem?” the clown asks—in an undertone, which is not much of a surprise considering he chose to loom so close. The question is.

Jason blinks.

“Cuz if it’s a problem we can get her to stop. She _does_ listen, if we’re firm enough.”

“It’s fine,” Jason says, just as quietly. “I’m not going to hurt her, I’m…under control.”

Jokester blows out a breath, squinting worriedly down at him. “I know you are, kid,” he says, oddly unhappy about it. “That’s not what I’m asking. She’s been all up in your business all morning. She’s little and we spoil her and she’s expecting you to set your own boundaries, and if you weren’t cuz you’re fine with it that’s fine, but if you were just bein’ polite I can have a talk with her.” When Jason doesn’t say anything right away, Jokester adds gently, “Don’t think you have to indulge her just cuz you’re a guest. If anything is making you uncomfortable, I want to know.”

“Can you—take a step back.” It’s a gamble, and a test, but he really is just a little uncomfortable being stood so close to for so long, even if it is for whispering. The man might be skinny, but he’s _tall._ Jokester obeys with an alacrity that’s actually slightly alarming, but he seems _pleased._

“Sorry! Guess it’s obvious where she gets it from, huh. So, I should tell her to give you more space?”

“No, it’s fine.” More than just reflex, this time. He realized—it’s a little sick that he found her smacking him comforting, but all the same she’s the only person here who doesn’t know what he is, and he doesn’t want her warned away.

Jokester worries his lower lip with two teeth. “I saw you flinch—”

“It’s _fine,_ ” Jason interrupts, and doesn’t even expect to get in trouble for it. “I just—it’s been a long time.”

The look on the clown’s face is too much like pity. He needs that pity, he knows—it’s why he was offered this chance at all. It still stings. “Jason,” he says, almost solemnly, and raises one hand slow enough that Jason will have time to move or frown or something, if he minds, then sets it on his shoulder, like he did right before Jason took his mask off. He has to lean forward a little to make it work, because he stepped back out of arm’s reach, but he does it so smoothly it almost doesn’t seem weird.

His hand is as heavy and still as it was last night—how can someone with so much nervous energy have so much _calm?_ —and warmer through thin cotton than it was through the stuff of Talon’s uniform. “Let me know if there’s anything you need. Okay?”

Jason swallows, and forcibly stabilizes his biorhythms, and nods. Jokester makes an unsatisfied little huffing sound, pats his shoulder, and takes his hand away.

“While I’ve got you here, we should talk about your options.”

“Options?”

“Well, I was kinda assuming you’d want to get out of the city asap.”

And…that makes sense, was preying on his mind earlier, but now Jokester says it Jason is very clear that he’s wrong. He knows this terrain, after all. Knows who belongs to the Owls and where the escape routes are. The further away he runs the more likely it is he won’t recognize danger when it reaches him.

Plus even if he wanted to leave, he’s missed his window to do it _fast._ “Too late for asap,” he points out, and the clown pulls a rueful, acknowledging sort of face so at least they won’t have to argue on that. “And transit is the most vulnerable point in any operation. Owlman hasn’t found this place so far looking for you, so there’s no reason to think he’ll find it now.”

That he’s been reminding himself of this all night gives it extra emphasis, and he stops there rather than run out any more evidence for why he should stay right here, and sound desperate.

 _You said you’d protect me,_ he doesn’t protest. If Jokester doesn’t want him here, arguing isn’t going to change his mind.

The clown scratches his cheek, along the seam of one of the scars. Jason wonders if he knows how creepy that looks. “You wanna lay low here?” he asks. “With us? I mean, that was on the list of options, but you’ve been so twitchy it was pretty far down.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Jokester, I…am doing the one thing I was brainwashed hardest not to, besides trying to kill him. I am going to be twitchy _wherever._ ”

The Jokester makes a noise like _snorfl._ It seems to be a form of laughter. “Point taken,” he says. “I’d like to make it as easy on you as we can though, so let me know if you think of anything that’d help.”

Jason nods again. He’s pretty much lying, but this is a form of ‘telling the boss what he wants to hear’ that he can’t really imagine coming around to bite him.

Small footsteps come pounding up again, and there’s no surprise in it when the littlest clown pops into the kitchen again. She takes a surprisingly solid stance—have they been training her?—and puts her hands on her hips. “Daddy,” she complains, “Jason’s supposed to come play.”

The clown chuckles. “And I’m distracting him, huh? He’s not a new toy, you know.”

“I know that! _Daddy._ ” Apparently even the six-year-olds who know him develop tones of longsuffering irritation to address the Jokester with. He wasn’t kidding about his powers of annoyance.

He laughs. “How ‘bout it, kiddo, you up for a game?”

The second it takes Jason to realize he was the ‘kiddo’ is sort of embarrassing. “Sure,” he shrugs. “Candyland, here I come.”


End file.
